The Health Secretary, on the Republican Bill

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Tom Price speaking to reporters about the Congressional Budget Office report on Monday at the White House.CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times

March 15, 2017

To the Editor:

In your March 14 editorial about the Congressional Budget Office’s score of the American Health Care Act, you wrote: “The numbers are the numbers. The C.B.O. has called it as it sees it, and the picture is clear.” As I’ve said, I strenuously disagree, and so did your editorial board.

As you wrote in a Feb. 3, 1994, editorial about President Bill Clinton’s health care proposal, “The Budget Office’s estimates of savings from health care reform, through no fault of its own, are guesswork.”

This week’s C.B.O. assessment, which you praise, finds that with almost no changes in subsidies or Medicaid, 14 million Americans will drop their insurance next year. That is worse than guesswork; it is simply unbelievable.

The Budget Office scored a Republican bill that is just one part of President Trump’s plan to provide affordable, quality health care to every American. It is a great disservice to your readers to ascribe such certainty to the Budget Office’s numbers, and to offer no mention of the other reforms in progress.

As you wrote in 1994, numbers “from today’s health care system provide no useful guide to expenditures under a completely different system.”

President Trump and our team at Health and Human Services are working every day to carry out health care reform that is truly affordable and puts patients first — in other words, a completely different system from the failing health care law we have now.

THOMAS E. PRICE, WASHINGTON

The writer, a physician, is secretary of health and human services.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: The Health Secretary, on the Republican Bill. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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